Richard Stone (anti-racism activist)

Richard Malcolm Ellis Stone OBE (9 March 1937 – 5 March 2024) was a British medical doctor, social campaigner and philanthropist. Stone was best known for his association with the Runnymede Trust and the Jewish Council for Racial Equality on issues of race and politics, as well as race and society more generally in the United Kingdom. Stone was appointed to the panel of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry; a case involving a Black teenager who was murdered in London in 1993; which eventually led to the Macpherson Report, which defined the British Metropolitan Police's response to the incident as "institutionally racist." Stone was also noted for his association with the Jewish interfaith group The Woolf Institute.

Stone was born on 9 March 1937 to Joseph Stone, Baron Stone and his wife Beryl. Joseph Stone (born Silverstone) was born in Wales to a British Jewish family. Richard Stone's father was a medical practitioner and after relocating to Hampstead acted as the personal physician to Harold Wilson, the two-times Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for the Labour Party from 1964 to 1970 and again from 1974 to 1976. Other close family members of Richard Stone, influential in British society included his uncle Arnold Silverstone, Baron Ashdown, who was involved with the Conservative Party during the time that Edward Heath was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and another uncle Sidney Bernstein, Baron Bernstein, who was Chairman of Granada Television, playing a major role in the development of commercial television and was a Labour Party life-peer. During the Second World War in 1945, he had produced the German Concentration Camps Factual Survey documentary, in association with the Psychological Warfare Division. Consequently, Stone is also related to Alexander Bernstein, Baron Bernstein of Craigweil, another Labour Party life-peer who was among the financiers of Michael Levy's Labour Leader's Office Fund during the New Labour-era while Tony Blair was British Prime Minister.